What Happens When Twelve Thousand Game Developers Converge?

Nick Kaman, the co-founder and art director of Aggro Crab, an indie-game studio in Seattle, is twenty-six years old, with messy, brass-bleached hair, large round eyeglasses, and a small silver hoop in each earlobe; self-deprecating and sincere, with a sarcastic streak, he speaks with slacker chill. At the University of Washington, he studied human-centered design and engineering--"Pretty cringe," he said--while teaching himself how to make video games. Eventually, he started running the on-campus game-development club, which taught students how to build games along the lines of Flappy Bird using Unity, a game engine. "You can make that game in half an hour, but by doing that you've learned all these fundamentals of game-making," Kaman said. "Like, how do I do player input? How do I do jump physics? How do I spawn in pipes that move from the right to the left?"